Amulets

Gold-foil burial amulets constitute a distinctive mortuary convention attested across maritime Southeast Asia, in which small, thin, leaf-shaped pieces of gold foil were placed over the facial orifices of the dead. The practice, documented from Bali, the Philippines, and Borneo, with comparative parallels in China and South India, represents a persistent ritual tradition spanning at least 1,700 years [1, p. 70]. Beyond these funerary objects, the broader category of amulets in the Malay world encompasses coin-like metal discs employed in healing and protective rituals, as recorded in Kelantan in the 1930s [2, pp. 302–304]. Together, these records illuminate two distinct but thematically related dimensions of amuletic practice in the region: the use of precious metal in death ritual and the deployment of inscribed or figured metal objects in the living world of medicine and magic.

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “amulet” in the context of these records covers two functionally different categories of object. The first is the gold-foil burial amulet, a small, very thin, leaf-shaped piece of gold placed over the eyes and mouth of the deceased. O’Connor and Harrisson note that in view of the traditional beliefs, widely held in Southeast Asia, of the very special properties of gold, and the careful ritual prescriptions surrounding its mining and working, this custom would probably signify something more than mere markers of rank and status [1, p. 70]. Gold, considered to have been “grown” like an organic substance in the secret workings of the earth, transmuted from other substances and charged with magical power, luminous and incorruptible, was used to light the way of the distinguished dead on their journey into the land of the ancestors, conferring magical protection and possibly the hope of resurrection in the context of ideas closely akin to alchemy [1, p. 70].

The second category is the Pitis Jawa (also called Pitis Semar), a coin-like brass or bronze amulet found among medicine-men in Kelantan. Rentse describes it as regarded as keramat—a term denoting sacred or inviolable power—and employed during main berbagih healing performances for curing illness, recovering lost property, or expelling evil influences [2, pp. 302–303]. In one variant of the performance, the amulet is suspended on a turmeric-dyed cord and held over burning incense while the medicine-man chants invocations; the amulet’s movement is taken as a sign that the deity depicted upon it has descended and possessed the practitioner [2, pp. 302–303].

Regional Distribution and Material Evidence

The gold-foil burial amulet is attested at three principal sites in maritime Southeast Asia, each providing evidence at a different chronological horizon. At Gilimanuk in West Bali, Professor R.P. Soejono of the National Archaeological Institute of Indonesia excavated an eye-cover in November 1964 from a site estimated to date from approximately 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. The object, attached to skeleton No. LX in sector No. XVIII, is apparently made of silver with a very thin facing of gold, and was missing a piece of the nose-bridge that would join the two eye-pieces [1, p. 73]. The site is described as a bronze-age settlement containing about 80 skeletons of adults and children, provided with gold ornaments, axes and rings of bronze, bracelets and beads of glass and shell, pottery, and sacrificed domesticated animals; only one eye-cover was recovered during the entire excavation [1, p. 73].

In the Philippines, a piece of gold foil was excavated in situ on a skull in a grave at Oton, Iloilo, Panay, where the material is considered to date from the 14th or early 15th century [1, p. 72]. A gold nose shield was also found at the site. The Oton eye covering is decorated with repoussé dots in much the same manner as the gold foil excavated in Sarawak, but is both more elaborate and more literal in its representation of the eye [1, p. 72]. Spanish colonial records provide corroborating textual evidence: an account based on an eighteenth-century work by Gaspar de San Agustin notes that it was customary to place the corpse in a hollow log and that little strips of gold were arranged over the mouth and eyes, while the seventeenth-century author Francisco Colin states that after the rich and powerful were bewailed for three days, they were placed in a box or coffin of incorruptible wood, the body adorned with sheets of gold over the mouth and eyes [1, p. 72]. Additional gold-foil pieces purchased by Mrs. Rosa C.P. Tenazas from a dealer in Cebu City, while of unknown provenance, are very close to the smaller undecorated pieces found at Santubong in Sarawak and seem likely to have served as facial coverings in a mortuary context [1, p. 72].

At Santubong in the Sarawak River delta, excavations have brought to light a number of pieces of gold foil, many of them leaf-shaped [1, p. 73]. At the Santubong complex, almost all the leaf-shaped gold foil has been excavated from Jaong, a late T’ang–early Sung site characterised by intensive iron working and megalithic activity. Eleven pieces bear a median breach-cut, and the range in scale is from a maximum length of 52 mm to a minimum of 20 mm; three pieces are elliptical in shape, while the remaining eight have pointed ends [1, p. 73]. The gold foil pieces at Jaong were found in a zone of numerous selected pebbles regarded as “megalithic” in character, and are also often found in association with whole stoneware ceramics of Chinese provenance. Although skeletal material was not recovered in this open site, subject to rapid chemical action and heavy rain, the goods are very likely to have been deposited as grave furnishings [1, p. 73]. A Sarawak Museum team has also recovered similar, but sparsely represented, material from a site forty miles from Santubong at Gedong on the Sadong river [1, p. 73].

Comparative Parallels and the Question of Origin

The question of whether the gold-foil burial amulet represents an indigenous development or an externally derived practice remains unresolved. O’Connor and Harrisson note that there is almost nothing available on the subject in archaeological literature, and insofar as there is any speculation at all on the origin of the practice, it is ascribed to Chinese influence [1, p. 70]. The custom of closing the body orifices of the deceased is well known in China, and early Chinese alchemists believed that gold was capable both of prolonging life and, along with jade, of preserving the bodies of the dead from putrefaction. Ko Hung, a Taoist philosopher of the 4th century A.D., wrote in the Pao P’u Tzu: “If there is gold or jade in the nine openings the corpse will not putrify” [1, p. 74]. A fifth-century author, T’ao Hung Ching, provides further elaboration, noting that according to the regulations of the Han dynasty, princes and lords were buried in clothes adorned with pearls and boxes of jade for the purpose of preserving the body from decay [1, p. 74].

A number of objects in museum collections, reportedly recovered from Chinese tombs, are considered to have been employed for the specific purpose of closing the bodily apertures of the deceased. The specimens known to the authors are jade rather than gold, including cicada-shaped tongue amulets, womb and phallus preservers, a variety of plugs for the ears, nostrils and anus, and, most interestingly, pairs of convex oval or leaf-shaped covers for the eyes [1, p. 74]. A pair in the British Museum measures 1 7/8 inches by 1 inch and is attributed to the Han dynasty; all the eye shades bore tiny perforations at both ends indicating that they were tied on to the head of the corpse [1, p. 74]. While these jade eye pieces are close in form and function to the Southeast Asian examples, the authors are unaware of any Chinese eye or mouth covers in gold or any other metal [1, p. 74].

A further parallel external to Southeast Asia is provided by the gold-foil pieces found in the early iron-age burials at Adichanallur in the Tinnevelly district at the very southern tip of the Indian sub-continent. There, several thousand burials have been identified in a site spreading over 114 acres, largely secondary burials typically contained in urns, with a variety of grave furniture including earthenware pottery, iron weapons and implements, vessels and personal ornaments, traces of cloth, and gold ornaments [1, p. 75]. It is the gold objects—19 small oval or leaf-shaped pieces of thin foil—that excite particular interest. They range in size from 2 3/16 by 7/8 inches to 6 5/8 by 2 5/32 inches, and the ends of several have been extended by narrow strips which are perforated [1, p. 75]. The excavator, Mr. Rea, considered that they had originally been tied to the head, and was told that a custom still existed in Southern India at Madura of tying a plain rectangular strip of gold an inch or two long to the forehead of a corpse [1, p. 75]. Both in shape and surface treatment, the Adichanallur foils bear resemblance to the gold objects found in the Philippines and Sarawak, with repoussé dots impressed on their surface with special emphasis on rows of dots around the circumference, dotted centre lines, and dotted elements forming triangles cutting at right angles across the median line [1, p. 75].

O’Connor and Harrisson conclude that the question of influence would appear to be open. If, as the Gilimanuk material indicates, the custom of covering the eyes of the dead existed in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the Christian era, then the exchange of intimate traditions affecting the honoured dead between Bali and “nuclear” Chinese civilisation is somewhat strained; the existence of a widely shared custom in monsoonal Asia, including southern China, would perhaps be more plausible [1, p. 75]. Whether the practice is ultimately an indigenous development or is somehow related to roughly comparative thinking and practice in China or India cannot, on the basis of present evidence, be resolved [1, p. 76].

The Pitis Jawa: Amulets in Living Ritual

The Pitis Jawa documented by Rentse in Kelantan represents a different dimension of amuletic practice, one oriented not to the dead but to the living. The amulet is a coin-like object of brass or bronze, regarded as keramat, and is employed by medicine-men during main berbagih performances [2, pp. 302–303]. Rentse recounts a first-hand account of such a performance in which a man believed to be possessed by a hantu—actually the result of a centipede crawling over his face—was cured through the procedure [2, pp. 302–303].

The iconography of the amulets is of particular interest. Rentse catalogues six specimens, providing identifications of the figures depicted on each, drawing on the expertise of Dr. P. van Stein Callenfels. The figures include pre-Hindu Indonesian deities such as Bagong and Semar, as well as figures from the Javanese Panji and Mahabharata cycles, including Judhishthira, Dropadi, Arjuna, Krishna, Panji, and Dewi Sekartaji [2, pp. 303–304]. Rentse notes discrepancies between local Kelantan beliefs and Callenfels’s scholarly identifications, suggesting that the transmission of these objects from Java to the Malay Peninsula involved a degree of reinterpretation of their iconographic content [2, pp. 303–304].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on amulets, while limited in volume, reveals a clear progression from the documentation of living ritual practice to the archaeological investigation of mortuary material culture. Rentse’s 1936 note on the Pitis Jawa in Kelantan is a brief but valuable ethnographic record, capturing a healing performance in progress and providing the first detailed catalogue of the amulet’s iconography in the Society’s pages [2, pp. 302–304]. Its method is essentially descriptive and relies on the collaboration of a local informant and a specialist in Javanese art history, reflecting the interdisciplinary approach characteristic of the period.

O’Connor and Harrisson’s 1971 article represents a significant advance in both scope and analytical rigour. The authors explicitly note that there is almost nothing available on the subject in archaeological literature, and that their earlier detailed analyses of the Sarawak material had been unable to present photographic documentation drawn from a wider context [1, p. 70]. The 1971 article was designed to fill that gap, presenting photographic evidence from Bali, the Philippines, and Borneo in an amplified comparative framework [1, p. 70]. The study draws on excavation reports from the Sarawak Museum, the National Archaeological Institute of Indonesia, and the Archaeological Survey of India, supplemented by unpublished collections in Manila and Cebu, and introduces the Adichanallur material as a previously underutilised comparative datum for early iron-age burial practice [1, pp. 70–76].

The key unresolved debate that the literature leaves open is the question of origin: whether the gold-foil burial amulet is an indigenous development of maritime Southeast Asia or is related to comparative practice in China or India. O’Connor and Harrisson argue that the evidence does not permit a definitive resolution, noting the absence of gold examples in Chinese tombs, the chronological difficulty of positing a Chinese origin for a practice attested in Bali at the turn of the Christian era, and the suggestive but not conclusive parallels with the Adichanallur material [1, pp. 74–76]. The article thus serves both as a definitive synthesis of the available evidence and as a clear statement of the limits of current knowledge, inviting further excavation and comparative study.

MBRAS Sources

• Tom Harrisson and S.J. O’Connor (1971). Gold-foil burial amulets in Bali, Philippines and Borneo. S.J. O’Connor and T. Harrisson. JMBRAS 44: 70–77
• A. Rentse (1936). Majapahit amulets in Kelantan. JMBRAS 14(3): 302–304

References

1. Tom Harrisson and S.J. O’Connor (1971). Gold-foil burial amulets in Bali, Philippines and Borneo. S.J. O’Connor and T. Harrisson JMBRAS 44(1): 70–77. Read on JSTOR
2. A. Rentse (1936). Majapahit amulets in Kelantan JMBRAS 14(3): 302–304.